VIRTUAL ENVIRONMENTS FOR THE EVALUATION OF HUMAN PERFORMANCE: Towards Virtual Occupancy Evaluation in Designed Environments (VOE)

source

CAADRIA 2006 [Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia] Kumamoto (Japan) March 30th - April 2nd 2006, 521-528

summary

Analyzing and evaluating designs for modifications to suit the requirements of human performance is typically performed only after the architectural spaces and structures have been built and used, a process that is known as retrofit or post-occupancy evaluation. For people with disabilities, there is a special need to overcome this problem by evaluating the suitability of their home environments before the construction phase. Our work introduces a new methodology in which virtual reality (VR) is used for virtual pre-occupancy environmental evaluation (VOE). Our study demonstrates the potential of the VOE concept by developing an interactive living environments model to evaluate human performance before the construction phase. This paper presents an interactive virtual environment, ‘HabiTest’, as well as the initial results of a usability evaluation of this interactive environment.